Freecraft is an old warcraft2 clone. Attached a static build. You will need the datafiles installed before you can actually play the game. Extract the content of the fcmp-1.18.20030311-archive into folder /usr/share/games/freecraft and symlink directory data to default (ln -s data default).
The game is playable including sounds and music...
UPDATE 20120808: The static build turned out to be unstable so the pet is removed. I have uploaded a new dynamic linked bin which seems to be stable. Compiled on P412 with SDL static linked in so you do not need to have SDL-libs installed. Hope this one is stable!
Update 20120811: Added script to extract original WC2 graphics & sounds
Update 20120814: Finally found a way to build a static version with uclibc/tinyX11 - removing flags -DUSE_SDLA -DUSE_SDLCD seems to make the build stable. So attached a package with this build below.
Update 20120816: New static build with support for CD-music and support for mp3 & ogg sound formate uploaded (below) and script to unpack & convert sound files here.Update 20120823: Removed dynamic linked version as the static version seems stable and the dynamic was build with debugging on.
Update 20120919: New build uploaded that also works using Xorg...
Update 20130501: Removed attached files as forum no longer support the download. For download go here

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Last edited by goingnuts on Wed 01 May 2013, 14:19; edited 8 times in total

Just a first note : Seems to work on my Macpup_F3 (Puppy-4.3) installation. Have just opened the welcome screen cause am building gcc-4.6.3 atm, but worked. I am guessing there is a --windowed parameter somewhere.

@Karl Godt: Thanks for testing! Should run on most if not all puppy versions as no external libraries should be needed. The source for 1.20 holds no documentation and also some nifty tools to apparently use the graphics and sound/music from the original game CD are missing. The source for 1.18 has the documentation and the tools although I haven't been able to compile that version. The older versions can be found here.

Yes - its upxed. I can confirm that it is unstable . I have tried to track it down by enable debug but no indications. A dynamic build seems stable until now so I will replace the pet with that until I get the static build working.
Not sure why the windowed mode not working. Have you tried setting screen-size via options in the welcome screen?

Anyway thanks a lot for testing and reporting the error!

Its really a nice game! Haven't been able to pass first single player game yet so lots of challenge here!

For changing the graphics I found that wargus-2.2.4 hold the tool to extract sound and graphic from original WC2-CD or files...

Yes - its upxed. I can confirm that it is unstable . I have tried to track it down by enable debug but no indications. A dynamic build seems stable until now so I will replace the pet with that until I get the static build working.
Not sure why the windowed mode not working. Have you tried setting screen-size via options in the welcome screen?

Anyway thanks a lot for testing and reporting the error!

Its really a nice game! Haven't been able to pass first single player game yet so lots of challenge here!

For changing the graphics I found that wargus-2.2.4 hold the tool to extract sound and graphic from original WC2-CD or files...

It seems that LDFLAGS="-static -s" don't work correctly . A static build usually is bigger than a dynamic build, but here it seems to be the other way : it becomes smaller.

which were ignored . I got full screen and in the "Global Options" the checkbox "Fullscreen" had a sticky mark which would not untick. Probably it is partly a Xorg-1.3.0 vesa driver problem. Xorg-1.7.6 loads intel driver.

where i have altered new2dir to run in force mode and rescue runs find command instead of installwatch.
I duplicates itself into the directory to be further used as ' ./"$me_base_name" ' to be able to alter configure options on it.

After that i was reading your question, so i compiled DirectFB en bunch too, which succeeded from version 1.0.1 to 1.4.17 simply "./configure" and randomly parts of these with

Thanks for sharing your scripts and findings! I have tried to get some of the tools from 1.18 working and now I have the "wartool": Can extract all the original graphics and sounds from WC2 giving the possibility to play the original campaigns. Attached an image of freecraft running with the "new" data-set. There are also a tool called startool - best guess is that we also can get freecraft to play starcraft...
I will post the wartool and additional scripts when they are more polished.

I am wondering if it is possible to use the freecraft GUI to create new directories, instead of using rox to navigate there. All he .pud puzzledata files are .gz . Wondering what BZLIB should do for freecraft.

BTW : freecraft should have a default key binding for the "Print Key" to make screenshots that get laid into the top level of the $HOME directory under names "screen[NR].png" (mine does work) :

BTW : freecraft should have a default key binding for the "Print Key" to make screenshots that get laid into the top level of the $HOME directory under names "screen[NR].png" (mine does work) :

Cant get that working...

As for choosing which data-dir to use inside freecraft I think it is not possible. We can create menu-actions where "-d datapath" is part of the command as an alternative.

I did try to recursively convert gz to bz2 but bz2 seems to have problems with files containing spaces. We should be able to reduce size on disk by 10-15% if bz2 is used.

Another approach could be to reduce number of colors in all the png-files. A command line tool is needed here - anyone got one laying around?

I have tried to find the original starcraft on the web but have failed until now - any hints here are welcome.

Attached archive holds source, scripts and data for my modified wartool to get access to the original WC2 graphics and campaigns.

If you do not have the original WC2 cdrom you can find different sources on the web. I have used this for my testing. It does not hold the expansion pack so I haven't been able to test if wartool also works if expansion is present...

The freecraft AI is really hard to beat...
There are two possibilities to make the game more "human":

Code:

-f factor
With this parameter you will set up the relative cost for the
computer’s units. Default is 100. If you set this to a higher
value, computer will have to spend more resources for creating
units, and viceversa.
-s number
Number of frames before AI awakes. This is useful if the AI is
beating you hard, and you want to make it sweet like a cat. The
higher, the easier will be the game against the AI. Default is
to sleep 0 time frames.

Update 20130501: Removed attached files as forum no longer support the download. For download go here.Last edited by goingnuts on Wed 01 May 2013, 14:23; edited 2 times in total

I have uploaded a new static build which support CD-music and mp3&ogg sound formate. The CD-support enables you to play music from your CD-drive...
mp3/ogg sound support enables conversion of the sound files from wav to mp3/ogg which can reduce used space on disk for the sound-files.
Below example data from sound directory (original WC2data) - sizes before and after conversion:

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